Often, one may hear the word “selenium” from the IT specialists’ mouth. But how does selenium, the chemical element of the periodic system, touch the software product development cycle?
No way. As Selenium is a tool for automated testing of the software products, it is the common-use software. And why exactly selenium, let’s say, not bromine or potassium? We will speak about it a little later.
Frequently, web application testing takes much time as there is a range of different browsers and their versions, one should concern the networking type, platform peculiarities, and so on.
The manual coverage of all these product function aspects by the test cases is out of sense since it needs to perform cross-browser testing, localization testing, compatibility testing, and a set of other checking types which require time and money.
The specialists realized this and developed Selenium. Really, automated testing, in this case, will be the best way out. But Selenium – not the only one universal tool, this is a whole set of tools, required for the qualitative checking.
What Are the Selenium Components?
- Integrated Development Environment (Selenium IDE)
- Remote control (Selenium RC)
- WebDriver
- Selenium Grid
Each of the mentioned components is a certain testing tool which follows specified goals and has a set of capacities.
Nowadays Selenium RC and WebDriver have consolidated to the framework Selenium 2. By the way, Selenium 1 is the part of the Selenium RC. Software testing just needs such tools and, fortunately, a lot of them are developed. And now mobile testing, software product checking, desktop application testing are much easier and faster to be performed.